In Living Color
by TolkienGirl
Summary: On the last night before arriving in Neverland, the passengers of the Jolly Roger reflect on the roles (and colors) that define them. Much angst, some hope, and a sprinkle of Captain Swan, of course. Read and Review!
1. Charming--Blue

**A/N: So, I'm really enjoying OUAT-totally obsessed with it at the moment, though I didn't love the Aurora/Mulan storyline (Mufire and Philrora are ****_my_**** ships) OR Neal showing up in Neverland in this past episode. Still, I'm in love with the fact that my favorite characters-Emma, Hook, Snow, Charming, Rumple, Regina, and Henry-are all in the same place and so I felt inspired to write this fic. Basically, there's a color for each character, that defines their chosen fate-and struggle. I had so much fun writing it and I hope you enjoy reading it! Please favorite/follow/REVIEW (please, please) and most of all, enjoy it!**

**Mostly canon, with some Captain Swan hints because...YES. I am a glad sailor on THAT ship.**

**First up:**

CHARMING—BLUE

He clasps his hands a little more tightly around the worn wooden knobs of the wheel, wishing that the amused eyes of the pirate weren't fixed so unwaveringly on him and his dubious progress as helmsman.

_Keep it together, David. You've got this._ He's startled, inwardly, that he addressed himself as David. Maybe, after everything, Charming seemed like a little too much pressure.

He avoids the pirate's gaze and fixes his eyes on his wife instead, who is squinting encouragingly up at him under the glare of the noon sun. Instead of being reassured, he's just a little more rattled—Snow, as usual, has complete confidence in him, and at the moment he's beginning to wonder if it's well placed.

Finally he decides not to look at any of them and raises his eyes to the sky—which, storm-free for once, is the very bluest thing he's ever seen. Bluer even than the sky of the Enchanted Forest, and that is high praise.

_Or is it?_

Blue. It's so strong and holy, the color of sky and sea, vast and powerful and steady. Blue is the flash of his rich prince's cloak, waving like a flag ahead of his army, spurring his troops to follow it. Follow the "true blue". Follow their prince.

Sometimes it is hard to have so much confidence placed him, so much trust arrayed about him. There is always that voice, mocking, worrying, whispering in the back of his mind…_can you?_ Can he live up to the promise of courage and strength that the sky's hue promises?

Blinking in the sunlight—blinking in the blue he lowers his eyes back to Snow. Suddenly, her trust invigorates rather than burdens him.

He gives a turn to the wheel with enough purpose and resolve to elicit a faintly impressed eyebrow lift from the incorrigible Hook.

David and Charming are only masks…but James—James can lead.

Like sea and sky, he must—he will—endure.


	2. Snow--White

SNOW—WHITE

For some reason, she had thought, coming into this land of darkness…she'd be able to escape it. But then again, perhaps the thought hadn't been so fully formed. Has she really ever decided that it was possible to tie her struggles to a color?

_Well, it is my name._

Snow White. So pure, so perfect. And here it is again, in the light of mid-noon, bright white slivers of sunlight dancing on the crests of the waves.

They are blinding; it hurts to look at them.

So she doesn't.

But closing her eyes, turning away from the helm, retracing her steps towards her cabin—none of that can change her thoughts. And right now, her thoughts are white—so pure it stabs with the strength of a thousand righteous spears.

White. No margin for error, no room for mistake. If any other color was stained, it can still be itself—blue, red, purple, green—compromised but still constant. Not so white. Once blemished, it loses what it has.

_What does it have?_ What does she have? She is the Goodhearted Princess, the Fairest of them All. She is the faithful daughter and the self-sacrificing mother and the loving wife and the honorable warrior. She can't fall.

_But you don't want to fall._ Snow sinks down on her simply furnished bunk, resting her head in her hands.

_No. But I want to know that I could—that I could fall, and survive. _

The truth is, she's already fallen—she fell when she took the easy way and killed Cora.

Regina hated her for that. But in the end, isn't it what Regina wanted, in some twisted way? To crush the white between the weighty stain of blood?

_Well, that's what happened. Now nobody's happy._

Perhaps she isn't white anymore.

It should relieve her—but now, as she tries to escape it, to wrap herself in forgiving darkness, all she wants is to have it back. To fight for the right, the white—a prisoner to purity.

_Not a prisoner. A willing servant. _She knows her destiny.

She knows she may have destroyed it.

But maybe—maybe she can get it back. Maybe she can cleanse the stain. Maybe snow can rise again.

But if she gets it back, will she still want it?


	3. Rumplestiltskin--Gold

RUMPLESTILTSKIN—GOLD

The sun is setting. The pirate has announced that they will land tomorrow, and so this is their final evening at sea.

He is the Dark One, and therefore has no use for sunsets—although a sneaking little thought suggests that if Belle were here, he _might_ care after all.

But she isn't, and he doesn't.

He is ready to retreat to his cabin for a night that, as always, will be wakeful (not that anyone but himself will know)—for he is weary of the saccharine optimism of the Prince and Princess, of the brooding aloofness of Regina, and of the tension and furtive exchange of smoldering glances between Emma and the pirate. Yet, just as he begins his descent into the belly of the ship, he pauses. Because the sunset is fading into plummy darkness, but the clouds are still streaked with strands of gold.

Gold. Even with his love of deceit and double-entendres, he won't try to pretend that he doesn't love it…that he doesn't covet it. It has been his name, after all, for twenty-eight years—and names are powerful. But more than that it is his lifesblood, a slippery, luminescent, shining thread between his nimble fingers, crafted into a noose to delicately—lethally—seal any of his many deals.

If he lets his eyes stay fixed on those narrow paths of light, he can find himself back in his castle again, enthroned on (choked by?) power, simpering and laughing with crushing—_literally crushing_—amusement that is too broken to be humor.

He doesn't laugh like that anymore. Somehow, so many years of his deadly flamboyance lost its flair, grew to jangle and clang, like worn out coins.

Indeed, his occasional softly sardonic "Dearie" is all that's left—a mere glimmer of his former self. But the gold's still there. In his name. In his power. In what's left of his heart.

Gold. The allure of it, even in thought or memory makes his cold fingers tingle. Even Belle can't convince him to stop spinning, and if she can't, can anyone?

No—it is too late. He is at the center of his shimmering web—pulling every strand, holding the reins of everything that counts. Everyone who's anyone is tangled there…

…himself, most of all.


	4. Emma--Purple

EMMA—PURPLE

Purple. It comes at the ends of sunsets, at the death of something beautiful—just like she, Emma, has always seemed to stumble upon anything and everything good just as it is ending.

_Too late, always too late._ Somehow those hateful words seem softly, malevolently tangled in the flow of the waves that are lapping against the sides of the _Jolly Roger_.

_Purple_ waves.

Emma blinks. Surely it is an illusion—water is clear and blue by day, or inky black by night—but as she peers down from her place by the ship's rail there _does_ seem to be a violet tinge in the ocean's depths.

Maybe she's hallucinating—but then, this is the Never-Sea after all. It, like the land it surrounds, must be teeming with magic.

_Magic._ Magic, too, is purple—deep and heady and mysterious, full of power and pain. Magic is in her, as surely as she surrounded by it. Emma, while not quite missing the old lonely life of stark simplicity, is not certain she likes it. Magic and she and, for some reason, _purple_—they all have something in common. A startling, dangerous warmth at their heart, guarded by an unfathomable, imperceptible aloofness…almost a coldness. Almost a shield.

Halfway suspended between the passion of red and the purity of blue—does that make it the color of regret? Purple is the darkling pain of the bruises—visible, swift-fleeting, and invisible, long-lasting—that she carries, but it is also the purple of resplendent banners, heralding the regal status of the princess who she doesn't want to be.

_Is it too late for Henry?_

_Too late for me?_

She wants to love, to feel, to be free—but can she be free from the power when power is needed for freedom? Can she ever break free of Magic, of purple uncertainty…of herself? Can she ever embrace it?

She wishes she knew.


	5. Regina--Red

REGINA—RED

It's dark in the cabin as she tries to fall asleep, the ship rocking gently (yet disconcertingly?) beneath her, but all she can see when she shuts her eyes is _red._

Red. A whispered threat of death, poison hidden behind the voluptuous symmetry of an apple, pressed into the hand of her enemy, whose loathsome purity had been corrupted by the red: an invisible, sinuous serpent choking the life and goodness out of her as she bit hard into the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge—

Red. If it is a snake, undulating through the grass, is it not blood? The blood of armies and peasants, of children and farmers, of families and of the few she had briefly called friends. She has shed it all, and the serpent swells larger, twisting and creeping and flowing and engulfing the world in reproachful scarlet—

No, she will not think of red like that. Regina twists and turns as quietly as she can—the others are asleep—and tries to think of how the red before her eyes is beautiful. Strong. Powerful.

Red _is_ power—untainted, unsullied. Heartbeats. Thumping with passion for life. What is stronger than life? To harness life's will—to harness a heart—there's power _and_ passion.

Red is the color of seduction…a swipe of glossy crimson across her lips before pressing them against the lips of men who were nearly never strong enough to be her equal. She is always the conqueror, the devourer. Here are the hearts again, but they mock her rather than strengthen her. These men, ghosts of her past—they would let her take their hearts, but they would never give them to her.

Perhaps red might have been love—if…if her whole life had been spun on a different wheel.

But in the end, red will always be blood.

How she wishes it wasn't her father's, her mother's, Daniel's…Henry's.

How she wishes it wasn't her own.


	6. Hook--Black

HOOK—BLACK

It is night. Tomorrow, they will reach Neverland, and he tries not to think that this is his last night of any kind of rest.

_Considering, you'd be best off getting some sleep, Mate._

He knows he ought to, but he can't convince himself to go below decks just yet. Instead he gazes at the island that is looming ever nearer, unable to resist the morbid desire to imagine that he can already hear the plaintive, eerie, heartbroken wails of the Lost Children.

Swan will hear them too. He is torn—one part of him feels vaguely comforted, expectant, knowing that they will share that misery and wondering what will come of it. A new bond? A possible step—but another part wishes that she didn't have to hear it, that he could protect her, keep the terrible loneliness that lingers behind her eyes at bay.

Even above the soft splashing of the waves he can hear his heartbeat quicken—perhaps it is best not to think of the beautiful and elusive and frustrating and vulnerable Swan at the moment.

So, he tries to forget golden tresses and sea-green eyes and looks downward, into the murky ebony depths of the midnight sea. A slice of silver from the full moon—the moon is always full in Neverland—splits the dark waves, but that light offers the darkness no relief.

They are floating on blackness.

He's not afraid of darkness, of the pitchy, soulless shade—after all, he wears it. He wraps himself in it, in vest, breeches, boots, coat—and he won't admit, even to himself, that it's a shield. No, he's not afraid of black. Black is the color of revenge and of bitterness. Blackness is what he lives on. Just like the moonlight, his hook gleams silver, but, just like the moonlight it doesn't truly fight against the darkness. It's only an ironic accent to the weapon and cloak of his despair.

It has always been better for everyone to think that his heart is black too, steel-hard and impenetrable. That way, nobody gets in. Nobody hurts him…at least, nobody hurts him again. He wore only black after Milah died, and it wasn't so much out of mourning as it was a promise—to walk in shadows, to fight darkness with darkness, to his death or the Crocodile's—whichever was needed.

Black is all he's had for a long time.

But…maybe, if Swan keeps looking at him the way she sometimes does when she thinks he doesn't see her, it will be time to let go of the darkness, to shed the blackness of the shadow as he would his coat, to feel again.

If he can.

**A/N: I hope you enjoyed it! Which one was your favorite?**


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